The women came from different countries with the same dream:
to leave behind the poverty of their villages.But instead of working as domestic help, they found themselves in a kind of prison,employed by people who treated them like something less than human.One was stabbed with a knife, another doused in boiling water, another raped and jailed.

Steve McCurry, best known for his work in war-torn countries like Afghanistan, documented the suffering of women from Indonesia,Nepal and the Philippines who endured a myriad of abuses whileworking for families elsewhere in Asia and the Middle East.

“They’re at the complete mercy of these people who see them almost like slaves:
‘You’re my property, you’ll do what I say,’” McCurry said.

“They go home, they’re disfigured, they don’t have money, and they’re psychologically scarred. They end up going home humiliated, and it becomes a stigma. In a way, their lives are ruined.”

Steve McCurry, who has spent about 35 years in Asia, came to this project
through Karen Emmons, a Bangkok-based journalist who
became interested in the abuse of domestic workers about
seven years ago, while researching an ILO report in Indonesia.

They visited shelters in Hong Kong and
women back in their home countries:
the Philippines, Indonesia and Nepal, spending a week in each place.

It is not necessarily a new story.
A Malaysian couple was recently sentenced to be hanged for murdering
their Indonesian maid by starving her,
the latest in a series of headline-grabbing outrages.

Responding to horrific treatment in countries like Saudi Arabia,the International Labor Organization, or ILO, a branch of the United Nations,passed a treaty to protect domestic workers in 2011.

Yet the abuses continue, and
only 14 countries have ratified the treaty.
To see the list of countries which have ratified the treaty go to:http://goo.gl/NSPnXg

“We wanted to tell them that this terrible evil act had to be exposed,
just for humanity’s sake,” Mr. McCurry said.
“ I think if you’ve been wronged like that,
you just want people to know that this happened…”

Researchers have confirmed what parents have known for a long time;sharing a family meal is good for the spirit,
the brain and the health of all family members.- Anne Fishel, Ph.D.

India

In family life, love is the oil that eases friction, the cement that binds closer together, and the music that brings harmony. – Eva Burrows

Viet Tri City, Vietnam

Honduras

There is no better classroom
than the family table.
– Kaye Earle

Tibet

Burma

Other things may change us,
but we start and end with the family. - Anthony Brandt

Sri Lanka

India

Call it a clan, call it a network, call it a tribe, call it a family.
Whatever you call it, whoever you are, you need one.- Jane Howard

Lebanon

Indonesia during monsoon season

You can kiss your family and friends good-bye and put miles between you,but at the same time you carry them with you
in your heart, your mind, your stomach,because you do not just live in a world.
A world lives in you. - Frederick Buechner

Macedonia

Pakistan

Burma

Our family dinner table was like Speakers’ Corner in London. We discussed, debated, argued, declaimed –
all of us at the same time.
– E. Thomson Earl

Hungary

Afghanistan

It is not until much later, as the skin sags and the heart weakens, that children understand;
their stories, and all their accomplishments, sit atop the stories of their mothers and fathers, stones upon stones, beneath the waters of their lives. - Mitch Albom, The Five People You Meet in Heaven

To get the full value of joy you must have someone to divide it with.- Mark Twain

India

Tibet

Italy

Ultimately the bond of all companionship…
is conversation.- Oscar Wilde

Cambodia

Uganda

What greater thing is there for two human souls, than to feel that they arejoined for life–to strengthen each other in all labor, to rest on each other in all sorrow,to minister to each other in all pain, to be one with each other in silent
unspeakable memories at the moment of the last parting?- George Eliot, Adam Bede

Ethiopia

Cambodia

Cape Town, South Africa

Ireland

Dogs are our link to paradise. They don’t know evil or jealousy or discontent. To sit with a dog on a hillside on a glorious afternoon is to be back in Eden …- Milan Kundera

India

Ethiopia

Tagong, Tibet

If we are a metaphor of the universe,the human couple is the metaphor par excellence,the point of intersection of all forces and the seed of all forms.The couple is time recaptured, the return to the time before time.– Octavio Paz, Nobel Laureate in Literature

Mauritania

Lebanon

Ethiopia

MKS Steelworks, Serbia

Afghanistan

Morocco

He that is thy friend indeed,He will help thee in thy need:If thou sorrow, he will weep;If thou wake, he cannot sleep:Thus of every grief in heartHe with thee does bear a part.These are certain signs to knowFaithful friend from flattering foe. – William Shakespeare

India’s monsoon rains have covered the entire country a month ahead of schedule,
brightening the prospects for abumper output of summer-sown crops such as rice, oilseeds and
cotton in one of the world’s leading producers.

Mumbai, India

India

During the year I spent following the monsoon in a dozen countries, I learned to see it as a critically important event, and not the disaster it had first seemed to my Western eyes.

Varanasi, India

For half the world’s people, good monsoon s mean life and prosperity.
Bad monsoons mean famine and death.

India

Farmers experience the monsoon as an almost religious experience as they watch their fields come backto life after being parched for half the year.

India

Burma

For months there is no rain, and then there is too much.Half the world’s people survive at the whim of the monsoon.

Bangladesh

Rain is grace;Rain is the sky descending to the earth …– John Updike

India

India

Only He shakes the heavens and from its treasures takes out the winds. He joins the waters and the clouds and produces the rain.
He does all those things. - Michael Servetus (1511-1553)
Spanish theologian, physician, cartographer

Last month the world heard the tragic news
that more than a thousand people working at a clothing factory in Bangladesh,
were killed when the factory they were working in collapsed.

Burma

The appetite for cheap clothing in the West is insatiable. The people making the clothing often pay the true cost of these items. The scale of this factory in Burma is vast. The sense that these workers are just part of an immense machine is
accentuated by the pink shirts they are obliged to wear.

Whether it is men fishing, nuns washing dishes, miners digging beneath the earth, or working in the heat of a steel mill, work is universal, yet intensely personal. Millions work in order to survive, and for them,
there is no debate about how to achieve a life/work balance.

Woman working in a field devastated by volcanic debris and flood waters. Java, Indonesia

Shoe repair shop in India

Life grants nothing to us mortals without hard work.
– Horace

Burma

Your life is a journey, not a rest. You are travelling to the promised land, from the cradle to the grave. The Sunday at Home, December 7th 1854

Mumbai, India

Gujarat, India

The heights by great men reached and kept,Were not attained by sudden flight,But they, while their companions slept,Were toiling upward in the night.- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

MKS Steelworks, Serbia

Japan

Working for long periods under extreme stressful work conditions can lead to
sudden death, a phenomenon the Japanese call karoshi. The word in China is guolaosi.

Landi Kotal, Pakistan

Bakery run by Afghan widows, Kabul, Afghanistan

Croatia

Many find their identity in the work they do. Some enjoy intense satisfaction in their work.
For others, the line between work and play is hard to find.

India

Mumbai, India

Sugar cane farmer, Philippines

Everything yields to diligence.- Thomas Jefferson

Drying coffee beans, Brazil

If a man is called a streetsweeper, he should sweep streets even as Michelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed music, or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and Earth will pause to say, Here lived a great streetsweeper who did his job well. - Martin Luther King, Jr.

During the year I shot the monsoon assignment, I learned to see it as a critically important event, and not the disaster it had first seemed to my Western eyes.
Farmers experience the monsoon as an almost religious experience as they watch their fields come back to life after being parched for half the year.

Varanasi, India

NEW DELHI (Reuters) – India’s annual monsoon rains have arrived at the southern Kerala coast,a top weather official said on Tuesday, brightening prospects of higher farm output by aiding farmers to plant summer-sown crops such as rice, soybean and cotton on time.
– June 6, 2012

Goa, India

Rain is grace; Rain is the sky descending to the earth … – John Updike

India

For half the world’s people, good monsoons, those rain-bearing winds of
Asia and the Subcontinent, mean life and prosperity.
Poor ones are marked by famine and death.

Bangladesh

The rains fall on one horn of the buffalo, and not on the other.-Indian Proverb

Kabul, Afghanistan

Java, Indonesia

Nepal

Northern Territory, Australia

Tokyo, Japan

Tibet

It is no use to grumble and complain; It’s just as cheap and easy to rejoice.
When God sorts out the weather and sends rain – Why, rain’s my choice.- James Whitcomb Riley

Sri Lanka

Indonesia

Cambodia

The drops of rain make a hole in the stone, not by violence, but by oft falling.- Lucretius

Porbandar, India

India

Dalit women cleaning streets, Mumbai, India

Burma

Only He shakes the heavens and from its treasures takes out the winds. He joins the waters and the clouds and produces the rain. He does all those things. - Michael Servetus (1511-1553)
Spanish theologian, physician, cartographer

The word tsunami comes from two Japanese words: tsu, which means harbor, and nami, which means wave.

Japan

Japan

In March 2011, Japan suffered from one of most violent earthquakes in history.

Japan

Its coastline shifted by as much thirteen feet to the east.

Japan

The tsunami spawned by the earthquake destroyed virtually everything in its wake.

Japan

Duckweed carpets the water in a girl’s front yard at Bojonegoro, Java, Indonesia

Covering the monsoons entailed day after day wallowing in filthy
water up to my chest, or standing in the street in a torrential downpour, my shoulder aching from the umbrella
propped in my armpit, and an impatient assistant wishing he were somewhere else.

Porbandar, Gujarat, India

I spent four days, in the flooded city of Gujarat, India, wading around the streets in waist-deep water that was filled with
bloated animal carcasses and other waste material.

Porbandar, Gujarat, India

The fetid water enveloped me leaving a greasy film over my
clothes and body. Every night I returned to my flooded hotel,
empty except for a nightwatchman, and bathed my shriveled feet in disinfectant.

Chandni Chowk, Old Delhi, India

Goa, India

Hurricane Katrina which hit New Orleans in August 2005, was one of the deadliest hurricanes in the history of the United States.
Almost two thousand people died in the hurricane and the flood which followed.

New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina

New Orleans, United States

New Orleans, Louisiana, United States

New Orleans, Louisiana, United States

On December 26, 2004, the Indian Ocean tsunami killed over 230,000 people in fourteen countries.

Four days after the tsunami hit Sri Lanka’s coastline
A man prays for the victims